by Naomi Klein
As fast-food, athletic gear and computer companies step in to fill the gap, they carry with them an educational agenda of their own. As with all branding projects, it is never enough to tag the schools with a few logos. Having gained a foothold, the brand managers are now doing what they have done in music, sports and journalism outside the schools: trying to overwhelm their host, to grab the spotlight. They are fighting for their brands to become not the add-on but the subject of education, not an elective but the core curriculum.
Of course the companies crashing the school gate have nothing against education. Students should by all means learn, they say, but why don’t they read about our company, write about our brand, research their own brand preferences or come up with a drawing for our next ad campaign? Teaching students and building brand awareness, these corporations seem to believe, can be two aspects of the same project. Which is where Channel One, owned by K-III Communications, and its Canadian counterpart, the Youth News Network, come in, perhaps the best-known example of in-school branding.
At the beginning of the decade, these self-styled in-school broadcasters approached North American school boards with a proposition. They asked them to open their classrooms to two minutes of television advertising a day, sandwiched between twelve minutes of teenybopper current affairs programming. Many schools consented, and the broadcasts soon aired. Turning off the cheerful ad patter is not an option. Not only is the programming mandatory viewing for students, but teachers are unable to adjust the volume of the broadcast, especially during commercials. In exchange, the schools do not receive direct revenue from the stations but they can use the much-coveted audiovisual equipment for other lessons and, in some cases, receive “free” computers.
Channel One, meanwhile, charges advertisers top dollar for accessing its pipeline to classrooms —twice as much as regular TV stations because, with mandatory attendance and no channel-changing or volume control, it can boast something no other broadcaster can: “No audience erosion.” The station now boasts a presence in 12,000 schools, reaching an estimated eight million students (see image).
When those students aren’t watching Channel One or surfing with ZapMe!, an in-school Internet browser first offered free to American schools in 1998, they may turn their attention to their textbooks — and those too may be sending out more messages to “Just Do It” or “CK Be.” The Cover Concepts company sells slick ads that wrap around books to 30,000 U.S. schools, where teachers use them instead of plastic or tinfoil as protective jackets. And when lunchtime arrives, more ads are literally on the menu at many schools. In 1997, Twentieth Century—Fox managed to get cafeteria menu items named after characters from its film Anastasia in forty U.S. elementary schools. Students could dine on “Rasputin Rib-B-Cue on Bartok Bun” and “Dimitri’s Peanut Butter Fudge.” Disney and Kellogg’s have engaged in similar lunch-menu promotions through School Marketing, a company that describes itself as a “school-lunch ad agency.”2
Competing with the menu sponsors are the fast-food chains themselves, chains that go head-to-head with cafeterias in 13 percent of U.S. schools. In an arrangement that was unheard of in the eighties, companies like McDonald’s and Burger King now set up kiosks in lunchrooms, which they advertise around the school. Subway supplies 767 schools with sandwiches; Pizza Hut corners the market in approximately 4,000 schools; and a staggering 20,000 schools participate in Taco Bell’s “frozen burrito product line.” A Subway sandwich guide about how to access the in-school market advises franchisees to pitch their brand-name food to school boards as a way to keep students from sneaking out at lunch hour and getting into trouble. “Look for situations where the local school board has a closed campus policy for lunch. If they do, a strong case can be made for branded product to keep the students on campus.”3 The argument works for administrators such as Bob Honson, the director of nutritional services for the Portland, Oregon, school district. “Kids come to us with brand preferences,” he explains.4
Not all students’ brand preferences, however, are accommodated with equal enthusiasm. Since the fast-food outposts don’t accept vouchers from kids on the federal lunch program and their food is usually twice as expensive as cafeteria fare, kids from poor families are stuck with mystery meat while their wealthier classmates lunch on Pizza Hut pizza and Big Macs. And they can’t even look forward to days when the cafeteria serves pizza or cheese burgers, since many schools have signed agreements with the chains that prohibit them from serving “generic versions” of fast-food items: no-name burgers, it seems, constitute “unfair competition.”
Students may also find that brand wars are being waged over the pop machine outside the gym. In Canada and the U.S., many school boards have given exclusive vending rights to the Pepsi-Cola Company in exchange for generally undisclosed lump sums. What Pepsi negotiates in return varies from district to district. In Toronto, it gets to fill the 560 public schools with its vending machines, to block the sales of Coke and other competitors, and to distribute “Pepsi Achievement Awards” and other goodies emblazoned with its logo. In communities like Cayuga, a rural Ontario tobacco-farming town, Pepsi buys the right to brand entire schools. “Pepsi —Official Soft Drink of Cayuga Secondary School” reads the giant sign beside the road. At South Fork High School in Florida, there is a blunt, hard-sell arrangement: the school has a clause in its Pepsi contract committing the school to “make its best effort to maximize all sales opportunities for Pepsi-Cola products.”5
Similarly bizarre and haphazard corporate promotions arrangements are thrown together on college and university campuses around the world. At almost every university in North America, advertising billboards appear on campus bi cycle racks, on benches, in hallways linking lecture halls, in libraries and even in bathroom stalls. Credit-card companies and long-distance phone carriers solicit students from the moment they receive their orientation-week information kit to the instant after they receive their degree; at some schools, diplomas come with an envelope stuffed with coupons, credit offers and advertising flyers. In the U.S. Barnes & Noble is rapidly replacing campus-owned bookstores, and Chapters has similar plans in Canada. Taco Bells, KFCs, Starbucks and Pizza Huts are already fixtures on university campuses, where they are often clumped together in food courts inside on-campus malls. Not surprisingly, in the U.S and Canada the fiercest scholastic marketing battles are fought over high-school gym class and university athletics. The top high-school basketball teams have sponsorship deals with Nike and Adidas, which deck out teenagers in swoosh-and stripe-festooned shoes, warm-ups and gym bags. At the university level, Nike has sponsorship deals with more than two hundred campus athletics departments in the U.S. and twelve in Canada. As anyone familiar with college ball well knows, the standard arrange ment gives the company the right to stamp the swoosh on uniforms, sports gear, official university merchandise and apparel, on stadium seats and, most important, on ad banners in full view of the cameras that televise high-profile games. Since student players can’t get paid in amateur athletics, it is the coaches who receive the corporate money to dress their teams in the right logos, and the amounts at stake are huge. Nike pays individual coaches as much as $1.5 million in sponsorship fees at top sports universities like Duke and North Carolina, sums that make the coaches’ salaries look like tokens of appreciation.
As educational institutions surrender to the manic march of branding, a new language is emerging. Nike high schools and universities square off against their Adidas rivals: the teams may well have their own “official drink,” either Coke or Pepsi. In its daily broadcasts, Channel One makes frequent references to the goings-on at “Channel One schools.” William Hoynes, a sociologist at Vassar College who conducted a study on the broadcaster, says the practice is “part of a broader marketing approach to develop a ‘brand name’ consciousness of the network, including the promotion of the ‘Channel One school’ identity.”6
As several critics have pointed out, Channel One isn’t just hawking its advertisers’ sne
akers and candy to school kids, it is also selling the idea that its own programming is an invaluable educational aid, one that modernizes such arid, outmoded educational resources as books and teachers. In the model advanced by these broadcasters, the process of learning is little more than the transferring of “stuff” to a student’s brain. Whether that stuff happens to be about a new blockbuster from Disney or the Pythagorean theorem, the net effect, according to this theory, is the same: more stuff stuffed. So Fox’s attempts to flog Anastasia in schools didn’t stop with lunch-menu ads; it also provided teachers with an “Anastasia study guide.” Jeffrey Godsick, Fox senior vice president of publicity and promotion, explained that Fox was providing a service to the schools, not the other way around. “Public school teachers are desperate for materials that will excite the kids,” he said.7
It’s impossible to know which teachers use these branded materials in class and which ones toss them away, but a report published by the U.S. Consumers Union in 1995 “found that thousands of corporations were targeting school children or their teachers with marketing activities ranging from teaching videos, to guidebooks, and posters to contests, product giveaways, and coupons.”8
It will come as no surprise that it is the folks at the Nike World Campus who have devised the most advanced hybrid of in-class advertisement, public relations exercise and faux teaching aid: the “Air-to-Earth” lesson kit. During the 1997–98 academic year, elementary school students in more than eight hundred classrooms across the U.S. sat down at their desks to find that today’s lesson was building a Nike sneaker, complete with a swoosh and an endorsement from an NBA star. Called a “despicable use of classroom time” by the National Education Association and “the warping of education” by the Consumers Union, the make-your-own-Nike exercise purports to raise awareness about the company’s environmentally sensitive production process. Nike’s claim to greenness relies heavily on the fact that the company recycles old sneakers to re-cover community center basketball courts, which, in a postmodern marketing spiral, it then brands with the Nike swoosh.9
Hey, Kids! Be a Self-Promoter!
In a corporate climate obsessed with finding the secret recipe for cool, there are still more in-school resources to tap. After all, if there is one thing the cool hunters have taught us, it’s that groups of kids aren’t just lowly consumers: they are also card-carrying representatives of their age demographic. In the eyes of the brand managers, every lunchroom and classroom is a focus group waiting to be focused. So getting access to schools means more than just hawking product — it’s a bona fide, bargain-basement cool-hunting opportunity.
For this reason, the in-school computer network ZapMe! doesn’t merely sell ad space to its sponsors; it also monitors students’ paths as they surf the Net and provides this valuable market research, broken down by the students’ sex, age and zip code, to its advertisers. Then, when students log on to ZapMe!, they are treated to ads that have been specially “micro-targeted” for them.10 This kind of detailed market research is exploding in North American schools: weekly focus groups, taste tests, brand-preference questionnaires, opinion polls, panel discussions on the Internet, all are currently being used inside classrooms. And in a feat of peer-on-peer cool hunting, some market researchers have been experimenting with sending kids home from school with disposable cameras to take pictures of their friends and family —returning with documented evidence, in one assignment conducted for Nike, “of their favorite place to hang out.” Exercises like these are “educational” and “empowering” the market researchers argue, and some educators agree. In explaining the merits of a cereal taste test, the principal of Our Lady of Assumption elementary school in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, said: “It’s a learning experience. They had to read, they had to look, they had to compare.”11
Channel One is pushing the market-research model even further, frequently enlisting “partner” teachers to develop class lessons in which students are asked to create a new ad campaign for Snapple or to redesign Pepsi’s vending machines. In New York and Los Angeles high-school students have created thirty-second animated spots for Starburst fruit candies, and students in Colorado Springs designed Burger King ads to hang in their school buses.12 Finished assignments are passed on to the companies and the best entries win prizes and may even be adopted by the companies —all subsidized by the taxpayer-funded school system. At Vancouver’s Laurier Annex school, students in Grades 3 and 4 designed two new product lines for the British Columbia restaurant chain White Spot. For several months in 1997, the children worked on developing the concept and packaging for “Zippy” pizza burgers, a product that is now on the kids’ menu at White Spot. The following year, they designed an entire concept for birthday parties to be held at the chain. The students’ corporate presentation included “sample commercials, menu items, party games invented by the students and cake ideas,” taking into account such issues as safety, possible food allergies, low costs “and allowing for flexibility.”13 According to nine-year-old Jeffrey Ye, “It was a lot of work.”14
Perhaps the most infamous of these experiments occurred in 1998, when Coca-Cola ran a competition asking several schools to come up with a strategy for distributing Coke coupons to students. The school that devised the best promotional strategy would win $500. Greenbriar High School in Evans, Georgia, took the contest extremely seriously, calling an official Coke Day in late March during which all students came to school in Coca-Cola T-shirts, posed for a photograph in a formation spelling Coke, attended lectures given by Coca-Cola executives and learned about all things black and bubbly in their classes. It was a little piece of branding heaven until it came to the principal’s attention that in an act of hideous defiance, one Mike Cameron, a nineteen-year-old senior, had come to school wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo. He was promptly suspended for the offense. “I know it sounds bad — ‘Child suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on Coke Day,’” said principal Gloria Hamilton. “It really would have been acceptable … if it had just been in-house, but we had the regional president here and people flew in from Atlanta to do us the honor of being resource speakers. These students knew we had guests.”15
Though all public institutions are starved for new sources of income, most schools and universities do try to set limits. When York University’s Atkinson College sent out a call to donors in 1997 stating that “for a gift of $10,000 … you or your corporation can become the official sponsor for the development and design of one of our new multi-media, high-tech courses,” the college insisted that only the courses’ names were for sale —not their content. Roger Trull, who brokers deals with corporations at Ontario’s McMaster University, explains where he draws the line: “They have to be things that don’t impact on academics,” meaning only extracurricular sponsorship. Be sides, many point out that before lunchrooms and letter-man sweaters went brand-name, schools weren’t exactly corporate-free turf. Advertising historian Stuart Ewen writes that as early as the 1920s, teaching kids to consume was seen as just another way of promoting patriotism and economic well-being. Back then, toothbrush companies visited American schools to conduct “toothpaste drills” and cocoa producers made cameos in science class to demonstrate “the various stages in the production of cocoa.”16
And in more recent history, commercialism had already become a major part of campus life before the brands even arrived. For instance, U.S. college sports is a big business in its own right with sales of merchandise generating $2.75 billion in 1997, a higher figure than the merchandising sales of the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. And well before the fast-food invasion, many cafeterias had already been contracted out to companies like Marriott and Cara, which also specialize in providing airlines and hospitals with institutional glop.
For these catering giants, however, faceless and generic was their calling card —the very antithesis of branding. When the prima-donna brands arrived on campus, they brought their preening and pos
turing values with them, introducing to schools new concepts like corporate image control, logo visibility, brand-extension opportunities and the fierce protection of trade secrets. And this collision of the dictates of academia with the dictates of branding often proves uncomfortable. At the University of British Columbia, for instance, students have been unable to find out what is in the text of an agreement between their school and the Coca-Cola Company. Despite the fact that UBC is a publicly funded institution, the soft-drink company demanded that the amount it paid for the vending rights be kept secret for reasons of corporate competitiveness. (Coca-Cola also refused to cooperate with requests for information for this book, claiming that all of its campus activities — including the precise number of campuses with which it has agreements —are confidential “for competitive purposes.”)
In May 1996, students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison did find out what was in the text of a sponsorship deal their administration was about to sign with Reebok — and they didn’t like what they discovered. The deal contained a “non-disparagement” clause that prohibited members of the university community from criticizing the athletic gear company. The clause stated: “During and for a reasonable time after the term, the University will not issue any official statement that disparages Reebok. Additionally, the University will promptly take all reasonable steps necessary to address any remark by any University employee, agent or representative, including a Coach, that disparages Reebok, Reebok’s products or the advertising agency or others connected with Reebok.”17 Reebok agreed to nix the demand after students and faculty members launched an educational campaign about the company’s patchy record on labor rights in Southeast Asia. What was exceptional about the Wisconsin clause is that the university community found out about it before the deal was signed. This has not been the case at other universities where athletic departments have quietly entered into multimillion-dollar deals that contained similar gag orders. The University of Kentucky’s deal with Nike, for instance, has a clause that states that the company has the right to terminate the five-year $25 million contract if the “University disparages the Nike brand … or takes any other action inconsistent with the endorsement of Nike products.”18 Nike denies that its motivation is to stifle campus critics. “If people could get away from this attitude that Nike is in this to control these universities, they would better understand what these things are all about,” says Steve Miller, Nike’s director of college sports marketing.19
